Much has been made of the fact that the United States did not veto a Security Council draft resolution this week that demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As a result, the text was approved as Resolution 2728. This angered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who canceled an Israeli delegation’s visit to Washington, complaining, “The U.S. did not veto today the new text that calls for a ceasefire without the condition of releasing the abductees.”
Since then, the mainstream media has focused on the “strained” relations between Netanyahu and the U.S. president, Joe Biden. The direction of the discussion was clearly indicated by the New York Times in a piece published on March 26, which opened, “Relations between President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appear to have sunk to a new low, with both men pressed hard by domestic politics and looming elections.” Nothing in that sentence suggested the fate of the Palestinians had a role to play in their disagreement. When in doubt over the Middle East, the rule of public deliberation in the United States seems to be to turn everything into an American story so readers will remain interested.
The Times went a step further in another article published the same day. It argued that although Donald Trump was listening to advisors who reflected the views of the Israeli right (and indeed extreme right), pro-Palestinian activists were continuing to concentrate on punishing Biden for having made Israel’s carnage in Gaza possible. Again, the implicit message was clear: The Middle East is better understood as part of an American story, and how foolish of the activists not to realize that injuring Biden politically might bring in someone far worse.
This is reminiscent of what happened in the build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. In many regards the public exchanges at the time over the possibility of war immediately became ones about the United States itself. Those who supported war made their case in the language of freedom and democracy, with which most Americans could identify. Those opposed described all supporters of a war as “neoconservatives,” even those who saw the removal of the Iraqi regime entirely in terms of Middle Eastern dynamics unrelated to U.S. partisan politics.
Such was the tenor of the discussion that the Iraqis, and Arabs in general, were largely absent from the internal American conversation over whether the United States should invade … Iraq. This tendency was also present after the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel, when a bevy of American politicians and publicists rushed to blame the Biden administration. Arabs have usually had bit parts in Western discussions of their region. While this is readily explainable—most people approach issues about which they know nothing by formulating them in terms they can understand—operating in a bubble invariably has negative policy consequences.
When October 7 happened, Biden primarily thought in domestic terms about how he should respond. The president was entering an election year and could not be seen to be abandoning an ally of the United States that had been viciously attacked, even less so when supporters of Israel form an important constituency in the Democratic Party. This was comprehensible, but it also meant that Palestinians were largely left out of the president’s ruminations, which ultimately burned him.
The problems began after weeks of slaughter in Gaza, when the administration failed to grasp the import of the South African genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and unwisely chose to react to it politically. The spokesman of the National Security Council, John Kirby, dismissively remarked in response to a journalist’s question, “We have said repeatedly that we believe these allegations, this case is unfounded and that there’s no basis for accusations of genocide against Israel. That’s not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly, and we certainly don’t believe that it applies here.”
Even when the ICJ issued an interim decision that viewed it as “plausible” that “irreparable prejudice” could be caused to Palestinians under the Genocide convention, the White House repeated that it saw no signs validating the “claim of genocidal intent or action” by Israel. This harmed the Americans even more internationally, because at that stage the court was merely observing that Israeli behavior in Gaza made that accusation credible, no more, so that the Biden administration seemed to be protesting too much.
Biden did try to compensate for his initial disregard of the Palestinians by offering the political horizon of a two-state solution. Yet the effort came across as a limp patch-up job, since Israel will continue to resist such an outcome, and Palestinians have concluded, with justification, that Israel is already too far down the road in its settlement project to allow for a viable Palestinian state. Moreover, the United States has spent over two decades largely ignoring the Palestinian problem and more or less looking the other way as Israeli settlements have expanded. No one really believes a two-state scheme can work today. Once the Gaza war ends, it’s more than likely Washington will return to an attitude of benign neglect.
After vetoing several Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, the Americans tried to slip through one of their own, which tied a ceasefire to a release of the Israeli hostages. Russia and China vetoed the U.S. proposal, seeing an opening to sandbag the Americans and push for a tougher resolution. By then, media outlets around the world were showing in grim detail Israel’s starvation tactics in Gaza (which U.S. officials themselves had acknowledged), forcing the Biden administration to backtrack. By continuing to arm Israel and abet its brutality, the admininstration had come to be viewed as complicit in Israeli war crimes. This became too much for Biden to handle, forcing the administration to abstain on Resolution 2728, which implicitly reflected recognition that most countries of the world were fixated on relieving Palestinian suffering.
The president’s delicate domestic calculations had been suddenly upended by international outrage, undermining the United States’ global standing. If all politics are local politics, it’s also true that in the case of the American superpower, all local politics can have global implications. Biden’s error was to completely eliminate the Palestinians from his initial assessment of how to react to October 7, so that by the time he noticed that Israel had no restraints in massacring Palestinians, most of them civilians, his responses were widely seen as too little, too late. Making matters worse, U.S. adversaries China and Russia exploited this to humiliate Washington.
There is often a disconnect between American readings of the Middle East and how others construe what is going on there, especially those within the region. This is hardly unique to the United States, but with the Americans it has been exacerbated by the fact that Israel has long been afforded a central role in interpreting the Arab world for American decisionmakers, to their detriment. It’s improbable the Americans will overhaul their method of dealing with the Palestinians, regardless of what happens in Gaza, but doing so would lead to fewer mistakes.
When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently warned that Israel could be isolated because of its behavior in Gaza—in this case because of a planned offensive in Rafah that might kill thousands of civilians—he could just as well have been speaking about the United States. Biden’s reversal on Israeli crimes in Gaza will not change the fact that for months it is Washington that made them possible.
